It’s careful, this thing — whatever this thing is — because there are so many bricks in this teetering tumbledown tower, which feels at risk of collapsing any moment if they push on it just the wrong way. The fact that she’d bled into the flagstones in the basement of his family manor. The way he had been awful to her, and she had thus been awful in retaliation. That volleying push-and-pull of their dynamic throughout school. His complicated relationship with her best friend. His family. Hers.

But Draco Malfoy wants very little to do with his family anymore, his mother aside.

So he looks at Hermione, and he sees that dip in the road which she just tripped over; quite similar to the one he’d suffered the evening before, with that sudden pique of anxiety hammering in his throat when he’d asked about disclosure forms. So this time it’s Draco’s turn to reach out, a hand absentmindedly brushing some of her hair out of her face and behind her ear (it has gotten really voluminous and out-of-hand in its morning tangles, it’s a wonder he didn’t suffocate in the night).

“I’m not done with you,” Draco says, echoing her earlier words. “So if you’d like to show off your flat and rub it in just how much better-appointed it is than mine, then by all means.”

Wry and arch, his voice dripping with what she’s learning is his usual fond yet slightly sarcastic humour, but it’s a way of papering over that brief blip, that temporary stutter in her voice.